The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts
KAREN ARMSTRONG
(BODLEY HEAD, 560 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In this rich and wide-ranging book, Karen Armstrong argues that we have forgotten how to read Scripture as it was composed to be read. Too many of us approach it as we approach the modern world in general: rationally and analytically, our thinking dominated by our left brain. As a result we tend, at best, to read it too narrowly and literally, at worst to use it to justify intolerance and conflict. But Scripture, Armstrong suggests, is written to capture something which logic and reason cannot: the right brain’s intuition that the world is pervaded and given meaning by a suprahuman reality. It is designed to expand the creativity and empathy of those who read it within worshipping communities; to develop their sense of the cosmos as an integrated whole; to transform them morally and spiritually. The modern world urgently needs to reintegrate the right brain back into the way it thinks and acts, so it needs to return to traditional ways of reading Scripture.

Armstrong develops this idea through parallel accounts of the evolution and use of Scriptures from (mainly) the Near East, the Indian subcontinent and China. We learn of the genesis of the Hebrew Bible, the Rig Veda and the Changes of Zhou; the Confucian Analects, the Upanishads and the Pali Canon; the New Testament, the Qu’ran and the Guru Granth Sahib. Armstrong’s narrative is essentially functionalist – at every stage, new Scriptures are seen as emerging in response to social pressures and social change – and it makes a fascinating read. For anyone interested in the writings of some of the world’s major religious traditions, this is a treasure chest of social and religious history. Armstrong’s lucid prose makes her many-stranded story remarkably straightforward to follow.